CH. xv] A NATIVE CHIEF 439 
his people came out to see us. The chief proudly wore 
a dirty jersey and pair of drawers ; a follower carried 
his spear and the little wooden stool of dignity on which 
he sat. There were a couple of warriors with him, one 
a man in a bark apron with an old breech-loading rifle, 
the other a stark-naked savage—not a rag on him— 
with a bow and arrows, a very powerfully built man 
with a ferocious and sinister face. Two women bore on 
their heads, as gifts for us, one a large earthenware jar 
of water, the other a basket of groundnuts. They were 
tall and well-shaped. One as her sole clothing wore a 
beaded cord around her waist, and a breechclout con¬ 
sisting of half a dozen long, thickly leaved, fresh sprays 
of a kind of vine ; the other, instead of this vine breech¬ 
clout, had hanging from her girdle in front a cluster of 
long-stemmed green leaves, and behind a bundle of long 
strings, carried like a horse’s tail. 
The weather was very hot, and the country, far and 
wide, was a waste of barren desolation. The flats of 
endless thorn-scrub were broken by occasional low and 
rugged hills, and in the empty watercourses the pools 
were many miles apart. Yet there was a good deal of 
game. We saw buffalo, giraffe, and elephant; and on 
our way back to camp in the evenings we now and then 
killed a roan, hartebeest, or oribi. But the game we 
sought was the giant eland, and we never fired when 
there was the slightest chance of disturbing our quarry. 
They usually went in herds, but there w r ere solitary 
bulls. We found that they drank at some pool in the 
Koda before dawn and then travelled many miles back 
into the parched interior, feeding as they went; and, 
after lying up for some hours about mid-day, again 
moved slowly off, feeding. They did not graze, but 
fed on the green leaves, and the bean-pods of the tree 
